by L F Seitz
“Why didn’t you heal yourself?” He asked, pressing his hand against my cheek. A glowing blue light blinded me for a moment, and then it was gone. His hand slid from my jaw to my neck, which he caressed as a blue light flared between us. I forced myself to stand.
“I don’t know how to,” I whispered. He shook his head before he took my wounded wrist and encased it in his grasp. Light shined between his fingers, and then I was healed.
“How did I do in there?” I asked, chuckling. The information we got was still being processed in my head as I flexed the muscles in my legs to keep them from buckling. Standing this close to Micah, all I wanted to know was what he was thinking. We worked pretty well together, I thought, but I wondered if Micah felt the same. I assumed I did horribly, since I went all demon and nearly killed the old woman.
“Better than I thought you’d do. Was a little worried when I saw the red light, and heard you scream, but I knew you could handle it.” A crooked smile.
“So you don’t think I was too mean? I think I was,” I said. Micah huffed a laugh as we started walking down the street. Exhausted and drained I walked twice as slow behind him.
“Wait up, I’m pretty beat. I’ll fall over if I walk that fast,” I whined.
When I was next to him, he wrapped his arm around my shoulder for stability. It was beginning to snow, and in the light of the streetlamps, with the snow falling, Micah looked surreal. If everything he said about me was true, would I expect someone half angel to help someone half demonic? Why would someone so celestial work so hard to save someone like me?
They wouldn’t.
Nine.
MORNING CAME. I WAS in the recliner when I woke, and in my line of sight, Micah slept in the corner with crossed arms, slumped against the wall. His hair covered his face, so I couldn’t tell if he was really sleeping, but his breathing was deep, heavy, and his body had completely relaxed. I was afraid to move in case I'd startled him awake. The last memory I had was of walking in the door and saying I wasn’t tired. Then Micah’s fingers on my temple. Bastard used his powers to put me to sleep. He’s done that, what? Like three or four times now? I wish I could do that to him; he wouldn’t like it, either. Screw it. I’m getting up, and I hope I wake him.
I leaned forward and pushed the leg rest down. Thankfully, this recliner was old and had a bar you had to move back and forth to lock it. I got up and tiptoed to the counter to start a pot of coffee. I opened the cabinet and noted my work bag still on the counter.
“Shit. What time is it?” I searched my pockets for my phone.
“I already called you out of work.” Micah’s deep, gravelly voice echoed through the room. I peered over to find him watching me.
“Why?”
“You’ve been really tired, and we were out late last night, so I didn’t want you to strain yourself.” He grunted as he stretched. His shirt rose, exposing some skin. I turned away and started to make coffee before I could get a good look, already flush at the thought of seeing his bare upper body. In all honesty, I was relieved not to work today.
“How are you doing after last night?” He asked as he walked toward the bathroom.
“Fine,” I lied. The bathroom door closed, and I groaned, resting my forehead against the cabinet. My whole body ached.
Since Micah forced me into sleeping last night, I still hadn't changed out of my work clothes. I walked into the bedroom. Lux stretched as he woke, but Nox was still fast asleep. “Morning, boys, how was your night?” I asked as I pulled off my shoes to get out of my jeans. Lux meowed then began to lick his fur. I snorted, because that was probably cat language for good. “I’m glad you guys had a good night, but mine wasn’t so great,” I said, pulling on black leggings, a red AC/DC shirt, and a Maroon zip-up sweater. Lux meowed again, as though to ask me why.
“Well, I got clawed in the face, and I had to fight this lady, and I got into a fight with Micah. Just too much at once, you know?” I said and plopped on the bed, accidently waking Nox. “Sorry, Nox didn’t mean to wake you,” I whispered, petting his head. He purred and stood, then put his paws on my thigh. “Do you want me to pick you up?” I asked. He continued to sit there, so I assumed that was a yes. I lifted him into my arms, and he snuggled into my elbow. It made me feel so much better. I walked out of my room as Micah was coming out of the bathroom, his hair up in a ponytail, exposing all of his sharp features. My face burned as I walked past him, petting Nox quickly.
“Nox, that much seduction should be illegal. He could kill someone,” I whispered as I set him on the floor next to the food dish, and he began eating the kibble. I poured two cups of coffee – one in my mug, the other in a glass – and walked over to hand the mug to Micah.
The deep blue markings on his neck were completely visible now. I followed their pattern. Thicker markings rose from his chest and curved as they made their way out toward his arms, following what looked like the main veins of his body. Small cords of navy branched off up his neck stopping at his jaw. I could see some coming up his back from under his collar, disappearing at his hairline. They must be everywhere. The heat from my face traveled across my body as I observed them. All of him was attractive: his long neck, his shoulders, and the thick-corded muscles of his arms. He was distracting.
“So last night,” he started. “Did that name sound familiar to you? Orias?”
“No,” I said slowly. How could it? As I walked past Micah, I saw a symbol on his neck just below his ear. I tried to cover my interest with a stretch, but the muscle in my shoulder kinked. I hissed, rubbing the area aggressively with my fingertips.
“I’ll find out what I can about him,” he said, studying me. “You sure you’re all right?”
“Is there a healing thing for soreness?” I whined, ditching my pride.
He set his coffee on the counter. “I should have taught you how to heal earlier. I’m surprised you didn’t keel over from blood loss last night,” he said, seeming guilty as he pulled his knife from his side. It was as long as his forearm, with a curved blade and a notch toward the hilt. Sharp-looking symbols that resembled a written language were etched along the steel, intertwined with swirling lines. The handle was a dark, twisted metal, the pommel engraved with a barn owl. The words Familia Ante Ominia were written in an arch above the symbol.
“Imagine a ball of energy at the center of yourself. It can be any size and red in color, but that is your energy. Focus on it moving through your body, like the blood beneath your skin. Now it is on your fingers, and you can will it to heal you,” he explained. He pressed his cool blade to the center of my palm and held it there for a moment. With a quick jerk of his hand, he cut me. I gasped as I snaped my eyes shut with the sudden pain, my skin throbbing as he pulled away.
Angst filled me as I watched the red seep from the wound into the crevasses of my palm.
“Heal yourself,” he said.
I did as he said, imagining a red light moving through me and into my other hand as I placed it over my throbbing wound. Nothing changed. I peeked to see the laceration still there.
“Use just one finger rather than your whole hand.” His voice hitched, as if he were amused by my struggle.
I touched my pointer finger to my cut. I took a deep breath and I pictured the light warming my skin and sealing the cut. A tingling warmth came from my pointer finger, tickling me. It dissipated, and I peeked at my hand to see my palm healed. Micah wrinkled his face in confusion as I noticed his jaw clenched.
“What?”
“The color of your energy is purple,” he stated. I observed my healed hand, still wet with blood. He said it would be red in color, but my light was purple? What did that mean? He turned away before I could ask, seeming beside himself about it. I washed off the blood in the sink, sighing heavily. I mean, it’s only a glow; it could just be another defect. Micah addressed my sudden exhaustion, he said it took a lot of concentrated energy to heal. Using a smaller surface area, like my finger, made it easier for a beginner to f
ocus their energy, and soon I’d be able to use my entire hand.
“I need a three-day coma to recover from all this recent energy loss,” I grumbled from my recliner. Micah sat on the floor beside me, back against the wall. I felt bad for not having furniture other than my recliner. If he was going to be here all the time, I really should get another chair.
Conjuring up everything from last night was hard. Maybe it was the blood loss, but my memory seemed fuzzy. The woman wasn’t a demon, but she had a symbol, almost like a brand, on her chest.
“You called that lady a demon harlot. Is that an official title?” I asked.
He cracked a smile and shook his head. “No, that is not the official title. They can be called many things: a demon doll, a pet of hell, whatever you want to call them, really. Basically, they are people who give themselves to demons for their demonic blood, which is extremely addictive and can give you powers – telepathy and psychic persuasion are the most common. Her precognition abilities are pretty rare. That mark above her breast was a brand from her demon master.”
“Didn’t know demons were into old ladies,” I joked. He didn’t seem to find it funny.
“She most likely sold herself a long time ago, when she was young,” he said. “Demons will hold onto humans until they die, then they take their soul.”
There was a long pause of quiet between us as I played with the zipper of my sweater.
“So you aren’t upset about what she said about your mother?” he asked.
“I would have liked to know her name, but I guess it’s not a big deal. She died before I was born. I don’t know anything about her,” I said inviting more coffee into my empty stomach. It growled, ready for breakfast.
“She said the demon who seduced your mom made himself invisible to her. I wonder what kind of demon can do that.” Micah slouched as he twisted the bracelet on his wrist around and around.
“A powerful one?” I added, then shrugged. I didn’t know anything about the demonic world, so his guess would probably be as good as mine – though it did scare me that he seemed dumbfounded by it. He’s like an almanac with his thirst for knowledge and answers. I thought about what else was said last night, and how the woman called me a name I’d never heard before. “What’s a Trigenus? She called me that, but I don’t recognize the word.”
“I’ll have to look into it. It doesn’t sound familiar,” Micah said.
My stomach growled again, and I couldn’t wait any longer for food. “I’m going to get a Pop-Tart. You want one?” I asked.
I opened one of the cabinets to find a box of Cheerios beside the Pop-Tarts. “I got these, too,” I said. I shook the box at him. He nodded. I brought the Cheerios and a strawberry Pop-Tart back into the living room. I saw him check for the expiration date when I handed it to him. I could see the symbol again hiding below his ear. It looked like a leftward-facing V atop a W, with a long tail off the end.
“What’s that symbol on your neck?” I asked. While I focused on it, I swear it started to move: the V transformed into a G, and the W turned into an M. I blinked several times before it returned to it's original state, maybe I was just hungry. I took a bite of my Pop-Tart.
“The symbol of the Nephilim,” he said, touching his fingertips to it. “We get it when we are inducted at eighteen, after finishing training. We are told it’s an ancient holy language the Nephilim has used since the beginning. Called the Punic Language. I can’t read it, no one can, but it was described as letters, symbolizing God and man coming together to make us. Who we are as a people.”
Wait. He couldn’t read it, but somehow the letters came to me? I could see an M and the G within the symbol. Did that represent Man and God? I mulled this over while chewing my Pop-Tart. We’d never eaten together before. It was nice to know he did normal things like sleep and eat. It should make me less nervous to be around him, but I don’t think I’ll ever get used to Micah. When he caught me surveying him, I blurted the first thing that came to mind.
“That bracelet.” I said as I fixated on his left wrist. It was double-strapped in brown leather with a single crystal bead. The same one I drew him wearing in my sketchbook. “Where’d you get it?”
“My mom.” He continued to chew. “On my thirteenth birthday.” The last time he spoke of his thirteenth birthday, he confessed to being responsible for the deaths of fifteen people. I couldn’t keep the regret off my face. I continued staring at it, wondering what his mother looked like, if she looked anything like him. Then I remembered his mom adopted him when he was two. “I had bad separation issues when I was young,” he started, sounding hesitant. “She had one just like it. She told me that while I was asleep, she took a lock of her hair and a lock of mine to a witch. The witch made two beads with our hair. I had hers and she had mine. Whenever I was scared, she told me to close my eyes and pinch the bead between my fingers. She said she’d sense it and send her love to me.” Micah was quiet after that. He adjusted a little against the wall, then cleared his throat as he continued to eat handfuls of dry Cheerios.
I waited what seemed like an eternity before I finally spoke. “Your mom sounds awesome,” I said.
“She was eccentric, to say the least.”
“The best people are,” I whispered into my glass of coffee. Every time I tried to think of something to say, I recalled what the shopkeeper said, about Micah being my demise. I wanted to know what he thought about that, but I feared it would start an argument. Even so, my curiosity got the best of me, as well as my urge to push the boundaries of whatever-this-is.
“So when do you think you’re going to kill me?” I asked. He choked on his coffee and sputtered. Then he glanced at me as he coughed, irritated.
“Are you really bringing this up again?” He snapped.
Feeling bold and unaltered by his anger I shrugged. “We need to talk about this, Micah. That old lady has, in your words, impressive precognition abilities. She said you were going to kill me.”
He grumbled into his cup that he didn’t plan on killing me, that his people didn’t even know about me. I found that odd: he spoke about the Nephilim so highly I’m curious why he hadn’t said anything. Why would he keep this from them?
“It’s not a good time,” he said, setting his coffee aside. “Besides, I wasn’t planning on telling them until I had more concrete evidence that you aren’t involved in The Rising.” He wiped the remaining coffee from his lips with the back of his hand.
“How would I be involved other than you dragging me into it?”
He explained how out of the five years he had been hunting, he had killed a lot of Cambions but never met one like me. I was well past ascension, so I should have been sired by now, or found my way into some sort of criminal circle given a Combion's nature. I haven’t yet though, making me very suspicious. The only good way to go about telling his people was if he had some kind of information to shine more light on The Rising. Doing that when telling them about me, and explaining how I helped, might make them less inclined to kill me. How comforting. I pointed out that people without demon blood also committed horrible crimes.
“Yes, but humans can be taken care of by their own kind. We’re here to handle the things in the dark humans can’t. Things with powers they can’t even fathom.”
I thought about everything he said. The woman at the bookstore told us Micah would kill me, that I was going to die, but Micah was adamant on keeping me alive. He said he wanted answers just as badly as I did. I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t help but think of what that old woman said: my death at the hands of Micah. Maybe it wasn’t so black and white. Micah said his people might somehow associate me with The Rising and that they might be inclined to kill me, so that could lead to my death, right? He could be responsible for my death but not the actual act? How could I combat that? How could I protect myself from death when I didn’t even know where it was going to come from?
I have to learn more about myself before they have a chance to end my life. May
be if I can protect myself I can keep from dying, or prevent it for as long as possible.
“So what else are you going to teach me?”
He turned his attention to me, and our knees touched.
“I think it would be counterproductive as a demon hunter to teach you how to use your abilities. You could turn against me.” He cocked an eyebrow, and my mouth opened and closed several times, so bewildered by his blatant statement I couldn’t decide on what to say.
“I would never do that,” I said quickly.
“What do you want to learn?”
I contemplated the question. What did I want to learn? Last night was scary but exhilarating. I still felt as though Micah was having me help him more for his benefit than mine, and I wanted to use that to my advantage and make him see that I could be someone to work with instead of for him. I wanted to be in control of my life for once, and the only way to do that was to learn what he knew: how to protect myself and how to fight. I shrugged and rubbed my hands against my thighs.
“How to defend myself, how to retain the Latin you say I already know, and anything else that is important.”
“Why do you want to learn all these things?” he asked.
“I already said to defend myself.”
“Any other reason?”
I raised my head to survey him, his orbs were pale, like a clear sky. The kind with no clouds, when the sun seems far away, exposing you to a sea of solid blue. “Why do I have to bare my soul to you all the time?”
“Like I said before, I let my guard down more than you realize,” he said.
Micah was still a stranger and not someone I could completely trust, but he knew more about this world than I did. He knew more about my kind than I did, and my best chances at surviving were with him. I didn’t know enough yet, and Micah had the answers, and if I could get him to teach me some things, I’d be better off when things got bad. I played with the hem of my shirt as I thought about how to make teaching me appeal to him. He was right: technically we were enemies, so teaching me would be counterproductive, but I don't think I'll find another way without him.